With a murmured applause of this sentiment, and in a renewed tumult of pleasure, Cosmo left his new friend, and went home lingering over the delightful thought of Italian legends and stories of the Rhine, told in the very scenes of the same. The idea intoxicated him almost out of remembrance of Mary of Melmar, and if the boy’s head was not turned, it seemed in a very fair way of being so, for the sentiments of Mr. Todhunter--a publisher!--a practical man!--one who knew the real value of authorship! filled the lad with a vague glory in his new craft. A London newspaper proprietor, who spoke like the possessor of the _North British Courant_, would have been, the chances are, a conscious humbug, and perhaps so might an Edinburgh bookseller of the present time, who expressed the same sentiments. Mr. Todhunter, however, was not a humbug. He was like one of those dabblers in science who come at some simple mechanical principle by chance, and in all the flush of their discovery, claim as original and their own what was well known a hundred years since. He was perfectly honest in the rude yet simple vanity with which he patronized “young talent,” and in his vulgar, homely fashion, felt that he had quite seized upon a new idea in his _Auld Reekie Magazine_--an idea too original and notable to yield precedence even to the _Edinburgh Review_. CHAPTER XXXVII. The pace of events began to quicken with Cosmo. When he encountered his fellow-lodger in the evening, he found that Cameron had been permitting his temptation to gain more and more ground upon him. The Highlander, humbly born and cottage bred as he was, and till very recently bounded by the straitest prospects as to the future, had still a deep reserve of imaginative feeling, far away down where no one could get at it--under the deposit left by the slow toil and vulgar privations of many years. Unconsciously to himself, the presence and society of Cosmo Livingstone had recalled his own boyhood to the laboring man, in the midst of that sweat of his brow in which he ate his scanty bread in the Edinburgh garret. Where was there ever boyhood which had not visions of adventure and dreams of strange countries? All that last winter, through which his boy companion stole into his heart, recollections used to come suddenly upon the uncommunicating Highlander of hours and fancies in his own life, which he supposed he had long ago forgotten--hours among his own hills, herding sheep, when he lay looking up at the skies, and entranced by the heroic lore with which he was most familiar, thinking of David’s well at Bethlehem, and the wine-press where Gideon thrashed his wheat, and the desert waters where Moses led his people, and of all the glorious unknown world beside, through which his path must lie to the Holy Land. Want, and labor, and the steady, desperate aim, with which he pushed through every obstacle towards the one goal of his ambition, had